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BBC Scandal Threatens to Become a Political Crisis

LONDON — The scandal precipitated by the torrent of sexual abuse allegations against Jimmy Savile, one of Britain’s most successful television hosts, showed signs on Wednesday of broadening into a damaging political crisis as Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative-led government clashed openly with the hierarchy of the BBC, the state-owned broadcaster that was Mr. Savile’s employer for more than 40 years.

The clash took the form of an unprecedented public warning to the official who sits atop the pyramid of 23,000 BBC employees, Christopher Patten, chairman of the BBC’s governors, that the government’s patience was wearing thin in the wake of the broadcaster’s shaky explanations as to why no action was taken from the 1960s on to end a pattern of what accusers have described as blatant child sexual abuse by Mr. Savile. At least 200 self-proclaimed victims of Mr. Savile, who died last year at the age of 84, have become known to police investigators in recent weeks.

The warning took the form of a letter to Mr. Patten — a former Conservative cabinet minister himself, Britain’s last governor in Hong Kong and Mr. Cameron’s handpicked choice for the top BBC post last year — from Maria Miller, the culture minister in the Cameron cabinet.

She told Mr. Patten that “very real concerns are being raised about public trust and confidence in the BBC,” which is financed by nearly $6 billion a year in license fees paid by all television viewers in Britain, She said it was “essential that license-fee payers are assured” that the BBC’s own investigations of the Savile scandal “are being conducted thoroughly” in line with the BBC’s duty to maintain “high standards of openness and transparency.”

That was taken by many political commentators as a blunt warning that the government, concerned for its own popularity at a time when opinion polls show it trailing badly behind the opposition Labour Party, was prepared to take responsibility for investigating the scandal out of the BBC’s hands by appointing a judicial inquiry. Some Conservative backbenchers have even said the government was also ready, if necessary, to fire Mr. Patten and other top BBC executives in a purge to show sympathy with public concerns about the scandal.

Mr. Patten, celebrated among many in Britain for the maverick, often idiosyncratic ways in which he confronted Chinese officials in the countdown to China’s 1997 takeover in Hong Kong, fired back a rebuttal of his own that demanded, in effect, that the government honor the commitment made in the BBC’s charter not to interfere in the broadcaster’s affairs.

As the scandal broadened, Mr. Savile appeared to be on course to becoming once again a public figure of outsize dimensions — though this time as a man universally reviled for the sex-abuse accusations, not as the wildly popular presenter of two shows, “Top of the Pops” and “Jim’ll Fix It,” which drew audiences of as many as 20 million people in the 1960s and 1970s, in a country that then had a population of barely 50 million.

As ever more lurid accusations against Mr. Savile have emerged from individuals who were boys and girls barely past puberty at the time, many in Britain have struggled to deal with the sudden reversal in national fortunes. From the euphoria of the summer, with its celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s 60th anniversary on the throne to the triumph of the Olympic and Paralympic Games held in London, the country has been plunged into a new trauma of gloomy introspection, asking what new shocks may be in store as one national institution after another — the banks, Parliament, the popular press and now the BBC — have been tainted by scandal in the past five years.

Correction: October 25, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article used an incorrect honorific for Christopher Patten. He is a lord, not a sir.

A version of this article appears in print on October 25, 2012, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: British Government Warns BBC on Sex Abuse Inquiry. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe